App Rejections

So, you’re a cop. You just arrested someone, and you have to read them their rights, quickly and accurately – or risk screwing-up later prosecutions / court-cases. Is there an app for that? Yes – POLICE MIRANDA WARNING. Is it simplistic and easy to use? Yes. Too simple:

“Apple actually rejected the application at first because it was too simple,” Shelnutt says. “I had to contact Apple and explained the need for it to be simple for easy access on duty.”

Personally, I dislike the sea of crap that stems from the vast range of copycat and trivial applications. And there are surely greatly more useful, and only slightly more complex apps, that could easily be made for use by police forces.

Even more so when people attach a 99cent charge to stuff that any number of iphone developers would happily do for free, if only someone had bothered to ask them.

But … look at the ratings. 5 ratings, and all of them 5 stars. Undeniably, this is an app that someone – somewhere – genuinely wanted, and was happy to pay for. Assuming of course that it’s not just a crude attempt at vote-stuffing, which it easily could be (a widespread practice, so long as you keep under the radar and don’t bring yourself to Apple’s attention)

Incidentally, there’s another app that predates this one by a month or so, identical in features, with a better name – but with *even less* usability (the words are formatted poorly, and it adds a tacky background image). I find myself wondering if the enterprising author of POLICE MIRANDA WARNING was simply so disappointed by it that he decided to make his own.

…and that’s where Apple’s “test of simplicity” fails: it blocks iteration and innovation.

I *like* platforms where there’s at least some filtering that keeps the worst of the crap away, so … what could we do that’s better? Well, there’s a lot of options from the world of Web 2.0 – we’ve recently had 10 energetic years of innovation in community-managed rating systems, most of which Apple has so far ignored.